“Okay!” says Natalie. “Great. So we can all wait. We’ll be at the beach so soon.” They have almost an hour to go, but thankfully nobody asks how soon. As much as she loves a good rest stop when her husband, Austin, is with her, the thought of unbuckling and unstrapping everyone and trooping inside on her own, keeping track of all three children amid the racks of bright candy, the old-fashioned bottles of soda, the doughnuts, my god, the doughnuts, fills her with an unbearable sense of exhaustion. She’d rather put everyone in a diaper, herself included. Anyway, it’s too hot to leave the dog in the car, even with the windows lowered pretty far down, and at some point you have to start to worry about the dog getting stolen.
While the tank is filling she leans against the Audi and checks her phone. There are notifications on all of her socials. Like, a lot of notifications. TikTok is going crazy. Instagram isn’t far behind. Probably X too, but she doesn’t open X. There are tags and links; there are alerts and dings and buzzes. There is a thumping inside her chest that she realizes is her heart, working overtime.
There’s a text from Bethany, the freelance publicist she recently hired.Article is out.
The article is out. The article is out!
Photos are great!!
The photos are great! She’s happy to hear this; the sun hadn’t cooperated on their photo shoot day, but the children had, and if she had to choose one of the two, that’s the one she’d pick.
Maybe don’t look at it tho?says Bethany’s next text.
Bethany follows this advice with a smiley emoji, so it’s hard to know if she’s serious.
Sorry, what, don’tlookat it? Don’t look at the profile inNew YorkMagazinefor which a reporter spent an entire day at the farm at the end of May and for which Natalie bought new outfits for everyone, scrubbed her baby-blue range, made a batch of skillet biscuits to serve with homemade jam plus her signature peanut butter cookies? Don’t look at her first big traditional media hit?
She clicks the link, and the article loads.
She barely glances at the photos, because the thing that takes up most of the page is a giant pull quote from Austin. It’s in red, splashed across the first page of the article like a bloodstain.
The gas pump judders once, then stops. The tank is full.
The quote is awful—the exact opposite of everything she wanted the article to convey. Natalie’s heart is beating too fast. It’s so hot and hazy in the July sun, on the melting earth. Is she going to pass out? Her knees are wobbly. She can’t pass out. She has three children and a dog with her. She doesn’t have the luxury of passing out. She takes a deep breath and slides into the car.
“What’s the matter?” says Evangeline. Evangeline always knows. She can read her mother like a text.
“Not a thing!” Natalie says, willing her voice into submission, telegraphing nonchalance. The greatest acting job, a wise man has never said (but should), is being a mother. “Not a single thing. Let’s get to the beach, okay? Onward!”
“Onward!” repeats Evangeline dutifully.
Natalie drives on.
At 10 a.m. Jordan picks up the rental car, an impractical Porsche with a back seat so tiny it could scarcely fit a baby (not that she has one, or wants one), at the Hertz in Midtown because the one closest to her, on Eighty-Third, had no vehicles available at short notice. People have scattered from the city for the holiday.
Jordan had spent the Fourth of July alone in her apartment, reveling in the air-conditioning, watching the Boston Pops on television, and polishing off a Jersey Mike’s Original Italian. Don’t feel bad for her! She’d turned down three invitations, two to the Hamptons and one to the Jersey Shore, because she wanted a break. Work has been crazy.
If Jordan were to get a tattoo, it would sayWork is crazy.
The Henry Hudson becomes the Saw Mill and her phone, plugged into the Porsche’s aux cord, rings. Really? It’s Sunday! Of a holiday weekend! But yes, really. Crises don’t look at the calendar before they decide to happen. They just happen. Jordan’s motto, which she adopted from her boss, Bernadette, is ABA: Always Be Accessible. She doesn’t take a shower without propping her phone just outside the shower door so she can hear it if it rings. (And it rings! Oh, how it rings!) She’s stood naked with shampoo dripping into her eyes taking a call from a newly disgraced US senator; she’s stopped a ten-mile run at mile nine and a half when Bernadette has asked her to schedule a meeting with a Hollywood director. She’s flown back from a long-awaited vacation on the Amalfi Coast to meet with the CEO of a major company (sorry, she can’t say which one) whose son was involved in a hazing incident at a prestigious college’s most prestigious fraternity.
But it’s not Bernadette, and it’s not a client who bypassed Bernadette to go right to Jordan, as more and more are starting to do, whichis making Jordan wonder if she’s not the only one beginning to question things about Bernadette. It’s a voice as plaintive as it is familiar.
“Whereareyou?” she says. “Nobody’s here but me.”
The next fifteen hours for Mae and Leo pass as quickly as... well, as quickly as you’d expect fifteen hours in a car to pass, which is to say not very quickly at all. The check-engine light comes on outside of Buffalo. That’s okay to ignore, right? The lights on her dashboard blink on and off like Christmas lights, giving visual pleasure and reminding one to donate to the Salvation Army.
Her father would not be happy to know the state of Mae’s car.
Mae has loaded up on Red Bull and Spotify, and she’s on Colorado time, which means she’s able to drive without too much trouble, now that she has a solid night of La Quinta sleep behind her. She’s a night owl by nature and also by lifestyle; the tattoo parlor where she works is open until 10 p.m., and often she and Tony go out after. She’s rarely awake before eleven in the morning.
(“How do you get anything done?” her sister Natalie has asked her. Natalie rises at five thirty and is in bed promptly by nine thirty every night. She won’t hear Mae’s reasoning that they’re actually awake about the same number of hours, and therefore capable of being the same amount of productive. Not that theyarethe same amount of productive, but theoretically they could be.)
Time goes by, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York. When Mae gets tired, she pulls into a rest stop on I-90 and sleeps for four hours with all the doors locked and Leo slumbering in the back seat, the windows cracked to give them air. She figures if anyone bothers them Leo will protect her. Despite his youth, Leo snores like a sixty-three-year-old man with sleep apnea, and, before she falls asleep, shecan see one of his ears twitching by the light of the moon, filtered through the dark sky to her spot in the middle of the parking lot. She learned in her training that dogs dream about their daily life, which is a claim she finds a little questionable (who made this discovery, andhow did they prove it?) but nonetheless charming. Maybe Leo is dreaming about her! Maybe he’s dreaming about Human Leo. She hopes it’s her. They did have that romantic night in South Bend.
They reach Massachusetts. Her home state. The Shipmans hail from Lenox, home to Tanglewood and Edith Wharton’s The Mount. She’s surprised, as she always is after time away, by how green New England is, especially after the dust bowl of a Colorado summer (they’re in a drought; so many Western states are in a drought or under wildfire watch or, more commonly, both). Here, the trees along the highway, so tall and verdant, seem to be closing in on her.
Sometime around nine in the morning Mae and Leo make it to New Hampshire. They exit the highway into the dubious charms of Seabrook (sounds prettier than it is) and then finally, finally, they are on the coast.
